MGS Drabble Night: four slashes
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: Yep, four slash drabbles. Snake/Otacon; Ocelot/Solidus; Raiden/Gray Fox; Vamp/Otacon.


**THE TWO**

There were two young men on opposite sides of the world, one fighting a desert war because he had nothing better to do with his life, one burying himself in codes and circuits because he had a lot of worse things he could be doing with his life. A typical 0000GMT would find one of them just rising for a morning's watch, bleary-eyed but alert, and the other asleep in his bed fully-dressed, trying to catnap around another deadline. Life was always within arm's reach - a rifle, a laptop. Nothing too complicated so long as you didn't stop to think.

There were two men on a cold island, and they had a job to do. One was hunched over a terminal in his office, poring over blueprints, trying to make himself see the flaws as a positive thing. The robot was a cloud. The other was across the canyon, hiding in a vent and looking through a mesh to see the prisoners below. Prisoners of the island. They were both working under duress, for people they shouldn't trust. They were both trying to make themselves invisible. (Think of it as a character flaw. Or don't think, don't stop, just do your job).

There were two old men on the _Nomad_. The girl was asleep, curled up in her chair like always; all attempts to give her a more comfortable place to rest had just led her back to that chair. So they were sitting on opposite sides of the room, indulging their respective vices; one watching cartoons with headphones in his ears, wishing he could block out the smoke-smell as easily; the other enjoying the nicotine rush, trying to make it block out everything else. They were used to sharing sealed air and their purpose in life; _to let the world be_, so they worked for themselves, and neither could make the other do anything, especially not giving up.

**SOLIDUS & SUNBURN**

Snakes were cold-blooded creatures, drawn to loiter in sunlight whenever the opportunity presented itself. Ocelot was chewing over that fact in his head - years of teasing John had left him with a whole ecology in his brain, and he bitterly applied it to the entire nest of snakes.

Solidus was certainly enjoying the heat. He was sitting atop the Big Shell, looking unusually informal, his head resting on his drawn-up knees; a red spot was starting to appear on the bald crown of his head, but Ocelot did not comment on it. Solidus was quite welcome to burn up if he wanted to. Ocelot had, as in so many other regards, arrived better prepared than the ex-president.

There were gulls swooping around them, seemingly becoming tame to their presence. Ocelot stood behind Solidus's back, his left hand resting on the shoulder of the degenerating clone, feeling sweat bead through his clothes with steepled fingertips. His right hand, his absorbed adopted traitor, held his gun steadily, waiting for the the wind and the waves and the birds circling around them to reach a moment so still as to be utterly ripe to be broken.

It came, and the gunshot rang out over the sea.

The bird landed a few feet away, blood splattering over the tails of Solidus's discarded coat. Not that Ocelot had intended to ruin his pristine clothing, oh no. Solidus did not seem startled, but merely eyed the bird curiously. "What was that for?"

"Hm," he replied. Not all snakes were the same, then. John would've had half the feathers off it by now.

**RAIDEN**

The Patriots had cut him down to almost nothing, and the Madnars had to build him back from there; the rest would take time to regrow, they said, but a complete shell would suffice in the interim. There would be no need for internal organs, or an internal skeleton; better to let his spine and skull float in a tough shell of the biochemical soup that was almost, but not quite, like blood.

The first Dr Madnar ambled about the lab in a cyborg body himself, better than human, with little wheels on the soles of his feet and fingers that resembled nothing more than Swiss Army knives, all scalpels and attachments and probes. He was an old man, and had no intention of ever being a frail one, much less a dead one. The second Dr Madnar was padding about in ballet shoes, and her ideas were more fresh and fierce than his; she had designed a shell with split feet and she spent her days mixing up new and improved versions of his blood chemistry.

They had cut away as much of him as they could and still leave him alive. He had whole new definitions of living, now; to breathe, to have a heartbeat, neither was necessary and both had been edited out of his new corpus. To think, feel, experience the world, all unnecessary; he spent his days in VR, in whichever imaginary worlds Ellen had managed to hack and copy over to their local area network. There were military memories there, old training missions for black ops squads long ago priced out by PMCs; there were forgotten ops, the abandonware of war-as-it-was.

Deep inside one, he found another thing just like him, walking in a shell and cutting through digital armies. It was part of an old Shadow Moses sim but constructed in some idealised form, all the elements swilling around like the blood inside the cyborg body, the complications disassembled after the fact - and put back together a piece at a time. He followed it through the snow, and down corridors, and past corpses; he wanted to stop it and ask it what the hell this was about. Another cyborg, but bleeding red onto the hangar floor, but still _made_ of something, still real enough to feel pain and to remember having bones and sinew. He wanted to fence with it, to taste it, to bring it back to life, but when Ellen turned off the sim it would be gone.

**VAMP/OTACON**

Why was it always the ones who'd hurt him?

It was like some sick emotional gravity. Julie had come, taken that place at his father's side that he half-remembered as belonging to his mother; taken the such-as-was family he'd always had, taken his old self, his heart, his virginity, taken his father into the water. And he'd loved her. FOXHOUND and Wolf had taken a life he shouldn't have had to begin with, working to destroy the nuclear balance of the world, and he had loved her. Snake - David - had taken Wolf. There were nights he still heard that shot in his dreams, an echo muted by the snow, by cold fingers still pressing over his ears in his sleep. Where love could bloom, it could be ripped out by its roots.

He had loved Dave. It had almost, almost been worthwhile, but then the accelerated ageing had pulled them years apart and Dave had become something unloving, something that refused to love, something that could be living in the same room as him and still abandoning him to care for their child alone.

So who else was there left to love except the only person who'd hurt him as much as his other loves had?

It was like probing a wound, sticking fingers inside and pulling them out red. It wasn't hard to bring himself to do; he'd always been the one who started it, who approached the things he shouldn't. It wasn't hard to do, either - just search the data from GW, hack Pentagon nets, trace Dead Cell's footsteps through the information world until he had a list of addresses. He left Sunny with Snake, because Sunny didn't need looking after and Snake didn't need an explanation.

It was raining when he knocked on the door of Vamp's apartment; it wasn't midnight, and the doorknocker wasn't a great curl of brass, and the door wasn't etched with strange runes, and when the vampire answered, his eyes didn't gleam and he didn't magically know what Hal wanted. But he was willing to listen. He was willing to take those red fingers in his, to bring them to his lips and taste the blood beneath the nails.


End file.
